es not seem to differ
materially from those of the present day. This is evident from old
type which were discovered in 1878 in the bed of the river Saone, near
Lyons, opposite the site of one of the fifteenth century
printing-houses of that city.

Also a page in Joh. Neider's "Lepra Moralis" printed by Conrad
Homburch in Cologne in 1476 shows the accidental impression of a type
pulled up from its place in the course of printing by the ink-ball,
and laid at length on the face of the form, leaving its exact profile
indented upon the page.

This accidental imprint shows a small circle, and it is presumed that
the type were pierced latterly by a circular hole, which did not
penetrate the whole thickness of the letter, and served, like the nick
in modern type, to enable the compositor to tell by touch which way to
set the letter in his stick.

The fact that a letter was pulled out of the form seems to show that
the type composing the line could not have been threaded together, as
set forth by Ottley in his theory of clay molds for casting type. It
is to be remembered, however, that in the early days of printing,
every printer was his own type-founder. The method of casting type had
not been standardized and each printer had his own individual ideas
both as to the kind of characters and the method used in casting them.
Some may have threaded their type together in lines and others may
have simply locked them up in the form face downward in the composing
stone to overcome any irregularities caused by crude methods of
casting.

Vinc. Fineschi, of Florence, in Italy, gives an extract from the
cost-book of the Ripoli press, about 1480, which shows that steel,
brass, copper, tin, lead and iron were all used in the manufacture of
type at that period.

Today we have the wizardry of mechanical production in the manufacture
of type. The linotype and monotype machines, uncanny in their
operations, have also come into common practice. Without them printing
would seem almost as primitive, in typography, as it was in its
infancy.

STEREOTYPING

About the beginning of the eighteenth century a certain Van der Meyer,
of Antwerp, made the next step towards a definite improvement in
typography, the first that had been attempted since the invention of
printing from movable, cast-metal type. Van der Meyer prepared the
composed pages of the Bible by soldering together the bottom of the
type in the form. This was the first "ster